EDINBURGH 2025: FORGET ME NOT Guest Blog

Forget-Me-Not: When Friendship Breaks, and Why We Put It Back Together
By Julie Lake & Annie Macleod

We met in sixth grade in theatre class and became instant friends. Annie was confident, flirty, and gave the best shoulder massages. Julie was funny and a pretty good actress for a 12 year-old. We were both talented singers, and we did choir and theatre together all through high school, made up songs, invented our own language, and dreamed big. You’ll hear that private language in the show - “Girl, I have a breast pumpzzz’zz ass, sucking up on my Ti-TAYS.” 

We never lost touch. We were bridesmaids in each other’s weddings. But our friendship faded a bit as life took us in different directions.

Then motherhood brought us back together. 

We reconnected in our late 30s during the early days of Covid. Julie had a newborn, Annie’s kids were a little older, and our weekly Zooms became a lifeline. Reconnecting felt easy and joyful - at first. Like finding a missing piece of ourselves.

But then came the rupture.

Julie was pregnant again. Annie had just left her marriage to pursue music and a new relationship. Suddenly, our lives looked very different - and we judged each other for it. The friendship fell apart.

This play was born after we found our way back.

Forget-Me-Not didn’t begin as a play. It started with texting songs back and forth, sharing stories, poems. We were each other’s first listeners and readers, slowly stepping back into creativity. But the more we shared, the more we realized this wasn’t just our story. It was something bigger. Something so many women go through.

So we turned our friendship - messy, painful, joyful, complicated - and our struggle to reclaim our voices into theatre.

The process was kind of like therapy, only with a guitar, piano, and mic. We wrote scenes and songs drawn directly from life. This show is a true story, there is nothing fabricated whatsoever.  We switch back and forth narrating the story, weaving in scene work from each of our perspectives as the story unfolds. One of the parts is set during high school years. The show features six original songs - three written by each of us - composed right in the thick of living the events we’re recounting. We sing harmony on every song, and our voices blend in this strange, beautiful way that’s become a kind of metaphor for our friendship: two distinct lives, two very different people, creating something better together.

Revisiting the hardest moments wasn’t easy. But putting it onstage stripped the shame away. We could finally see what was ours to own - and what wasn’t.

As artist-mothers, we’ve wrestled with the impossible tension between caregiving and self-expression. This show is our act of resistance. It’s our way of saying: both matter. We matter. Our music, our stories, our voices deserve space.

Premiering Forget-Me-Not at the Edinburgh Fringe feels equal parts terrifying and right. It’s the most public platform for the most intimate material. We’re singing about grief, motherhood, and missed chances - sometimes while crying -in front of strangers from around the world.

And yet, that’s what makes it feel universal. We’re not alone. The show literally begins with us singing, in harmony, “She’s not alone.”

One of the final songs always gets us. It’s more of a duet than the others. Peter Cook, our amazing director, insists we look at each other while we sing it. Every time, we tear up. It’s embarrassing. We rehearse and say, “Don’t look at me. Don’t smile. Dammit!” The lyric that gets us every time is:
“Some say I’m too old for this ride / but only now do I have enough peace and pride / to steer through the dark when it all goes wrong / to strip my life down to me and my song.”

At its core, this show is about repair - of friendship, of identity, of artistic voice. It’s about finding your way back to yourself and to the people who know you best.

We hope women - especially mothers - feel seen in our story. That they leave remembering the creative magic inside them, their right to take up space, and their power to begin again.

If even one woman in the audience feels like she’s been missing in her own life and walks away feeling just a little more alive—we’ve done what we came here to do.

Forget-Me-Not runs August 1–9 at Greenside @ George Street 11:40AM. We’d love to see you there. And if you’re the hugging type, come say hi after the show. We’re big on hugs. Well, Annie is at least.

—Julie & Annie

Forget-Me-Not will be performed at 11:40 in Greenside @ George St from 1st – 9th August